The joint call for proposals of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NRDI Office) and its Chinese partner, the Ministry for Science and Technology (MOST) announced with the policy support of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology is designed to promote research and development cooperation under a bilateral science and technology (S&T) agreement of a total budget of HUF 200 million. The call is open to project proposals until 12 February 2021. The focus areas are public health, physics and artificial intelligence.
In 2002, Hungary and China entered into a bilateral science and technology agreement, based on which calls for proposals have been launched regularly. This call of a total budget of HUF 200 million is the latest of such calls. Activities eligible for funding independently also include experimental development and applied industrial research.
From the Hungarian part, this new call provides a budget to the Hungarian stakeholders for financing promising joint initiatives involving Chinese higher education-research institutions and businesses. Project proposals must relate to the following focus areas: public health-disease control, neurosciences, physics and artificial intelligence as specified in the call.
Tibor Gulyás, Deputy Secretary of State for Innovation, Ministry for Innovation and Technology pointed out that: “Research and Development cooperation projects with Chinese partners are extremely popular among Hungarian applicants. In the former project-based Hungarian-Chinese call of 2018, applications were received for over HUF 1.1 billion. The industrial research and development projects then funded focused primarily on biotechnology, material science and energetics. So, the current call builds on topics that turned out to be successful in the previous one and these are also supplemented with fields where innovative solutions can effectively contribute to the successful management of the social challenges we are facing today in the fields of healthcare and digitalisation.”
The call is already available at the NRDI Office’s website. Applications for Hungarian funds can be submitted until 12 February 2021.